Guild Wars 2

Very likely, yes. I seem to remember it was 32-bit Win7 and nVidia drivers. You can search the forums to make sure. I can’t remember if updating driver versions (or downgrading) fixes it, or if the current suggestion is to upgrade to Win 7 64-bit. (someone mentioned it being a free upgrade to go from 32-bit to 64-bit Win7, if that option appeals to you)

If the game runs, then it’s not a PSU problem. Your first clue that you might have a PSU problem is when you load up a graphics intensive or CPU-intensive application and your computer crashes or shuts down because the PSU can’t provide enough power. Similar results to a power outage.

FPS issues are more likely to be cause by a CPU that cannot feed data to the GPU fast enough to keep the framerate up, a driver/system configuration hiccup, or some unknown “thing” forcing the GPU to run at a lower clockspeed. If you can, you might want to run a GPU utility or the Catalyst Control Center while GW2 is running and see what the GPU clock is currently running at. This can be problematic if you don’t have dual monitors, though, since switching applications can change the GPU clock.

One simple thing to check might be your streaming video settings. If your computer is set to use “Hardware Acceleration” when watching videos, that can force the GPU clock to run at something like 400 MHz instead of the normal clock speed.

That’s not a good guess. If you read through the posts, you can find the same number of nVidia people having the problem as you find AMD people. I’m running an i7, 6GB Ram, and a Radeon HD 6870 and am not having any issues with keeping my framerate capped at 60 (with VSync on).

Since you have a laptop, there may be some power settings that might be causing your issues. Double check that your system is set for “High Performace” to keep the OS from throttling your CPU/GPU speeds to save power. You might also want to double-check your power profile to make sure that your laptop doesn’t think it’s running on batteries. (my old laptop had a habit of pretending to be on battery power even when it was plugged into its docking station. curiously, if it was undocked but plugged into the wall, it was fine.)

Can you post your system specs? IIRC, there is an issue with certain graphics drivers on 32-bit Windows that causes an out of memory error.

“SoL” means “Soooo Out of Luck” or some other word that starts with “s” that isn’t kitten. But anyway…

I agree with the “play what’s fun for you” suggestion. This is a very new MMO that should be around for years. Buffs and nerfs are going to happen buh-zillions of times and things that are weak now will be OP soon, and vice versa.

Besides, just because it’s considered weak now, doesn’t mean that it IS weak, especially not in the hands of someone who knows how to play the class.

Are you running any of the ASUS utilities for your graphics card? I think I remember reading on other forums, that many people were having performance problems with a particular utility running. Oddly enough, it was a utility that was supposed to boost performance.

I don’t remember any more than that, but it might be worth looking into.

Well, I can make some general comments that may or may not shed some light on your situation.

GW2 client: My client is taking up about 15.5GB on the hard drive, so your client is about 2GB larger than it could be. And while it may not be due to fragmentation on your hard drive, it’s almost certainly due to internal fragmentation of the GW2.DAT file. That’s where GW2 stores all the data it has to load. During the beta phases, updates, patches, etc, the data in the file gets overwritten, added to, deleted, etc and that will cause the file to grow and change, just like moving files around on a HDD. The problem is that there isn’t any automatic way to defragment the file internally. If the file is heavilly fragmented (and at 2GB larger than normal, it probably is badly fragmented), it could be part of a slow loading issue. I’m not positive, but you might be able to use the “-copydat” command line switch to create a new DAT file. It might re-create the file in a more optimized state. “-image” only forces the game to download all the latest updates, it does nothing to optimize what you have.

Waypoint Distance: Obviously, the game loads all the data required to display the area you are in. It can also guess at what areas you might go to from where you are and pre-load that information so that you won’t notice the game pause when you cross into that new area. If you take a waypoint that’s still in your current area or an area that’s been pre-loaded, the game doesn’t have to do as much work and can get you back into the game. If you jump to an area that’s partially loaded, the game will have to unload some unnecessary data, load some amount of necessary data, and then put you back into the game. The amount of data that needs to be shuffled in and out will determine how long the loading process takes.

Load times: The biggest issue is going to be data transfer speed. A slow hard drive will significantly slow down the data transfer, but so will RAM speed, the number of channels the RAM has for reading/writing, and how wide the data/memory path is. Some of the newer motherboards and CPU’s have technology that significantly streamlines data transfers to and from memory. So if you have an older motherboard/CPU, you might be somewhat stuck at how fast the game can load the data.

Memory: With “only” 4GB of RAM, you may also be seeing issues because the game is fighting with the operating system and other programs to see who’s data gets to be kept in RAM and who’s data get’s paged out to the hard drive. Depending on your OS configuration/drivers/etc, the OS can use up 1.5GB of RAM. GW2 seems to like to have about 1.3GB of data in memory most of the time but I’ve seen it up to 1.7GB. And this is going to vary depending on what you’re doing, how long you’ve played, etc. So with just OS and GW2 running, you’re already using up 3GB of RAM. If you have other programs running in the background, they’re going to be fighting for what’s left. And you can’t just assume “It’s just my web browser, it doesn’t take up that much.” I’ve noticed that if I let IE sit idle on a web page it loves to slowly eat up available memory. I’ve seen it allocate over 1GB for a single webpage before I reloaded the page and dropped the memory usage back to a reasonable 50MB. So check what you have loaded in memory and make sure that you’re not using up more than the 4GB you have or that will cause you problems. Luckilly, you have a 64-bit OS, so if you want to, you can put in more memory.

FPS: Not sure why it’s so low. The graphics card should be good enough for GW2, but I don’t know much about AMD CPUs. Maybe the game is being more CPU-bound than it should be. That’s hard to say. There might be some good tweaking guides that could help you out. I wouldn’t automatically jump to the “game needs to be optimized” conclusion. The odds are that something else is going on that’s slowing things down. It’s just a matter of figuring out what those things are and fixing them.

sorry for the wall of text. Hopefully some of it is useful.

Everything I’ve read seems to say “no.” The armor you buy from each order is soulbound to the character that buys the armor, so it cannot be traded to your other characters. Also, there is no way to change orders, afaik.

It should handle it, but the usual disclaimers apply.

To ensure the best possible gaming performance, make sure that your laptop is plugged into AC power when gaming. Also edit the Windows Power Management Settings and make sure that the computer is set to “High Performance.” If it’s on one of the other settings, then Windows can (and will) downclock your CPU and GPU in order to use less power, and that will kill your gaming performance.

I don’t think so. There doesn’t seem to be any way to change the UI from its default state.

The HD 3000 chipset wasn’t really designed for gaming and high performance DirectX, and it relies on software emulation. It’s possible that some parts of the DirectX system are out of date. Have you tried using Microsoft’s DirectX Web Installer to make sure that your computer has the latest and greatest updates and bug fixes for DirectX?

Note: Just because a computer has DirectX 11 doesn’t mean that DirectX 9 is fully up to date. DX9 and DX11 are completely separate entities.

Try using the “Promote Skill Target” option. It’s supposed to lock the target to whatever you are attacking. I think.

It’s under the Combat section of the main Options page (F11).

A couple of suggestions, and a question? How familiar are you regarding editing your computer’s registry? I took a quick look and found a couple of places where the Guild Wars directory is specified there, so simply moving the folder won’t work.

If you’re good at registry editing, you should be able to figure out what needs to be done and how to do it. If you’re not comfortable messing with the registry, you can try option 2:

1) Copy the GW2 folder to a temporary location.
2) Uninstall GW2.
3) Start installing GW2, selecting your SSD drive as the destination location.
4) When the installer gets to the point where it’s downloading the files from the internet, exit the installer.
5) Copy GW2 from its temporary location into the new location.
6) Play the game.

(hopefully, the installer created a new shortcut or you might need to make one)

Well, ya know… If your computer isn’t connecting to the video card, that might be a problem. Ok, it’s a stretch, I know… You musta got the new guy.

I believe the trophy items are turn-in items that you collected during an event, but didn’t turn in. Things like irrigation parts or shiney apples or shards of ice. The items that let you help progress the event.

As for the server issue, I think I read something to the effect of “You’ll be able to group with your cross-server friends and play in the overflow zones, but you will not be able to quest on normal server zones. So anything that requires you to be on a server, you won’t get credit for.” I’m not sure exactly what those things are, but they may exist.

Take that WoW Screenshot watermarking story with a bit of skepticism. Many people are saying that the supposed watermarks are simply artifacts due to the JPEG compression.

Not that I’m an expert, but I followed the supposed instructions to view the watermark and all I saw was garbage. The same kind of garbage I can get by following those instructions on any JPEG image.

To get an idea on the different classes/professions, I’ve played all of them up to at least level 10. Most of them got deleted so I could create a new character after learning from mistakes the first time around. (but it helped me farm up a lot of crafting mats…)

I kept my warrior because it was fun to use all the different attacks with the various weapon types. Warriors seem very flashy and exciting to play and the DPS is really good.

That said, I kind of miss my guardian and I want to go back and give it another try. As Dabbaba said, the guardian seemed like a very survivable class with good healing potential and good DPS (not great DPS, but not too shabby). I’m not sure if I’m going to have to buy another character slot for my guardian or get rid of my lowbies to make room, though.

On the chatting issue… On my world, there is constant chatter going on, and I would expect it to be that way on all the worlds. Did you accidentally hide your chat window?

GW2 is roughly 15GB. So, yeah, it’s pretty big. I have no idea how much of a download you should expect for all the patching, though.

Avani Silver.2018:

You can change orders I just haven’t figured out how yet. It is possible to get all armors for all characters.

Are you sure? Everything I’ve read/found says that the choice is permanent.

You need to clarify what you are talking about. Lag is a network latency problem where actions you make are not being accurately reflected in a timely maner. Low FPS is when your framerate drops because your computer is having problems rendering the game at a constant rate. Also, is it a constant problem or one that comes and goes?

Since you only have 3GB RAM, it’s possible that you’re running into issues where the game gets bogged down when you enter new areas and the computer has to do a lot of memory swapping/paging in order to load the new information.

Yes. There are several threads about this issue, but I haven’t seen any solutions yet.

Lucille Fireball?

Even though your CPU and GPU temps are normal, it could still be overheating – depending on how good the cooling system is able to cool the ENTIRE video card. If it’s a long card and the back end is next to a hard drive or in a place where it doesn’t get adequate airflow, you could be seeing other parts of the card overheating and causing the problem. So you might want to take a look in your case and see if this is a possibility.

Another problem could be that your power supply isn’t able to provide enough power to the graphics card when things get complicated. A drop in power could cause the card to crash and stop sending signals to your monitor, causing the “no signal” behaviour that you describe.

I’m suggesting this because my computer had an airflow problem that left the back end of the video card without sufficient cooling. That let the voltage regulators overheat, the board didn’t get the right power, the board crashed which crashed the driver and essentially bluescreened Windows, but you couldn’t tell because the monitors went to sleep when they stopped receiving a signal.

My problem was solved by fixing the airflow issue. I’ve read similar threads where the problem was purely a power issue and people modified their BIOS settings to increase the voltage for the video card to solve the issue. Of course, that supposes that the power supply is strong enough to provide the right power on the right rails to begin with. But at least this might give you a few things to look into.

ICEAciD.8065:

Edit, off topic, same here, but how do we edit our posts?

In the lower-right corner of your posts, you should see an icon of a Pencil. Clicking that will allow you to edit your post.

How many gems do you have? If you do not have at least 2000 gems, you will not be able to purchase the upgrade. If you do have enough, then you should click on the box that says “2000” two times – without moving the mouse between clicks. The first click tells the trading post that you want to buy the upgrade and brings up a “Confirm” option. The second click confirms your purchase. If you move the mouse between clicks, it cancels the buying process.

After you successfully purchase the upgrade, you need to log out and log back in so that the account changes can take effect.

That sounds more like an issue with your graphics card/GPU than the CPU. Usually, the colored lines is a symptom of a VRAM problem or other issue with the graphics card.

I’d make sure that the airflow around the graphics card is good and that the GPU fan is workin properly.

Another posibility is that the power supply can’t provide enough power when the graphics card needs it and the computer is shutting down.

Did something change in the BIOS settings? Looking at the dxdiag report, it only saw the Intel integrated graphics chip and not the nVidia. Maybe the nVidia graphics got disabled somehow and the game is being forced to run through the Intel HD chipset. I can see how that would drop your FPS into the single digits.

Did you check your “Collection”? The CE mini pet should be in the very bottom section. At least that’s where mine went, after I learned it.

When I received those emails and went to the website to authorize the access, there was a checkbox for “remember this location” or something similar. I clicked it and I haven’t seen any emails since.

I think you mean “Double Tap to dodge” which refers to tapping the direction key twice, not double-clicking your mouse. AFAIK, Ceallach is correct. Arenanet did not put “click to move” in GW2.